Rare co-operation

The men heading two world bodies speak more than just the same language

A PAIR of bespectacled Koreans smiled down from giant banners flying over the slums of Kinshasa, the crowded and chaotic capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The double act being advertised was the UN’s secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, and the World Bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim, a Korean-American medical expert. Together they visited Africa’s seediest mega-city on May 22nd to launch a novel partnership between their two sprawling organisations.

In its simplest form, their idea is to get the World Bank to use its financial muscle to back the UN’s political agenda. In the case of Africa’s Great Lakes region, the bank has pledged $1 billion in development funds to back new UN efforts to keep the peace in eastern Congo, one of the world’s most combustible regions. As Mr Kim quipped to Mr Ban, “You bring the troops, we’ll bring the dollars.”

The two men have an obvious rapport. As the pair travelled together around the region, the UN man’s solemn speechmaking nicely matched his younger counterpart’s quicker, more informal style. Aides told of long and animated discussions between them in Korean.

With its current tally of 193 countries, the UN was set up to stop wars, whereas the world’s leading development bank, with only five fewer members, was meant to reduce poverty. Those objectives plainly overlap. But the vast bureaucracies that both have spawned have chafed at the idea of working in harness. A bank official involved in the logistics of the joint Africa trip called it a “nightmare”, while one of his UN counterparts compared the delegations’ coming together to a “collision”. After spending much of his career in health-related charities, the best Mr Kim could say about international outfits working together was that, in his experience, “sometimes they didn’t hate each other.”

Joachim Koops, director of the Global Governance Institute, a Brussels-based think-tank, cites the Peacebuilding Commission. Set up in 2005, it was meant to unite UN blue helmets and their development programme with the World Bank in order to turn around war-torn states. It has largely floundered amid intense rivalries within existing UN bodies, leading to wasteful duplication, scant information-sharing and devious efforts to undermine it. “While everyone agrees that co-ordination is necessary, nobody wants to be the one that is co-ordinated,” says Mr Koops.